1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to a method and apparatus for increasing the effective bandwidth of certain networks, and more particularly to a dual homing method and apparatus for increasing the bandwidth of FDDI and FDDI-II networks.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Communication networks (such as Local Area Networks and LANs) are designed to operate at a specific bandwidth. For example, Ethernet operates at 10 Mbps (Mega bits per second), while Token Ring operates at 16 Mbps, and FDDI operates at 100 Mpbs. In multimedia networking, these bandwidths are insufficient to carry the required communication, especially when multi-way multi-party networking (such as video conferencing), or high capacity networking (such as HDTV or high resolution medical imaging) is to be conducted. In particular, once the bandwidth of the network is used up, no additional users can participate until someone else gives up their portion of the bandwidth.
As will be appreciated by those skilled in the art, it would be desirable to extend the usage of the existing network bandwidth, particularly without changing the physical, signal layer specified and standardized by the national standards organizations (e.g. ANSI, IEEE, or CCITT). This means that the network remains compatible at a hardware level and at a low layer (OSI layer 1, 2, and 3) software layers.
Extending the usage of a network's bandwidth, would permit many more users to be active on the network, that is, in effect, increasing the capacity of a network. For example, if the effective bandwidth of a FDDI network was increased from 100 Mbps to 500 Mbps, then five times the information can be carried over the network; for example, five times the number of users could log onto the network.
U.S. patent application Ser. No. 08/801,379 filed Feb. 19, 1997 concurrently with this application, entitled Multimedia Application Synchronization Over Isochronous Newworks, assigned to the assignee of this application, and incorporated herein by reference, discloses a novel method of bandwidth sharing in which spatial domains are defined in a client/server architecture by coupling the server to two or more spaced apart points on the network. This invention relates to a unique and innovative method for managing, controlling, and establishing spatial reuse domains on a ring network in order to increase the effective bandwidth of the network.